pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

Over the last two weeks, Glitter Girl has been on a real mission of scrapbooking with die-cuts. Two entire adventures! The first deals specifically with manual die-cutting, whilst the second goes a bit more custom with cuts from a digital die-cutter like a Silhouette or the Cricut.

My personal rule is to only buy metal dies for shapes I will cut time and time again – so I have very few and what I have would all fall under basic or essential shapes, quite likely. The three sets I use most are all nested shapes (the same shape in several different sizes, perfect for layering) by Spellbinders – the small circles, small pinked circles and labels one (similar to the label die-cut shape from Jenni Bowlin). The pinked circles were sadly discontinued this year and I’ve continued to use them – but after this episode some scrappers started asking Spellbinders to bring back that shape. If you want to weigh in on that discussion, you can find it here on Facebook! Otherwise, you can find a few other options here and there or maybe find a shop that still has some in stock.

If you see anything in this episode you would like to add to your own stash, you can find a full shopping list here below the video, including additional dies on sale at the moment too.

Why yes, I do have new photo booth wedding photos to scrapbook! The lovely Rachel got married recently and we highly approve of her decision to have a photo booth at the reception. It’s a bit of a tradition now. I promise I didn’t wear a wooly jumper to her wedding: she knit those gorgeous owls for me as a thank you gift and we needed a photo or five to celebrate all that craftiness!

Rest assured, we can do more than just circles and such with die-cuts! I have a Silhouette for custom die-cutting, and use that for anything I might just want to cut once or twice. I love that I can design the cut myself or buy just individual designs from the Silhouette online store. With the cartridge based cutters, I always found I would like just a few designs on each cartridge, making each cut quite expensive. With the Silhouette store, I just buy the individual designs I like and that works out far more affordable for me. For this page I used three different cutting patterns from the Silhouette store – a suitcase, banner and a word card.

Supplies for this project can be found here. In addition to the Silhouette, that includes all sorts of fun stuff, like a new collection of tiny glitter pots, lots of label and letter stickers, and three paper collections I’ve really enjoyed using lately.

And it’s these photos that will make you think I will photograph and scrapbook just about anything. Which is possibly true. But I’ve been meaning to get the story of how we handled laundry while backpacking into this album. We became such experts in how to get our clothes clean and dry every single night, so it deserves to be recorded. I took a few pictures of this along the way and I think I even filmed a little video of one of us being a bit silly and faux-demonstrating to the camera how to wash something in a hotel sink. We had 100ml of soap concentrate and it lasted the full trip – just! That way we were allowed to take it on the plane as a carry-on. Of course it really came in a giant bottle to start, and we aren’t even halfway through that at home. It’s amazing just how concentrate a concentrate can be!

Onward, covered in glitter, my dear scrapbookers!

The Adventures of Glitter Girl is a weekly series on Two Peas in a Bucket, and goes live every Wednesday. I’ll share each adventure here shortly after that. I hope you enjoy her quests for crafting happiness, and if you ever have a scrapbooking dilemma yourself, you can always call her to action on the message board.

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On the twenty-second of every month, we bring you Gardeners’ Digest – a blog hop of scrapbooking news from the Garden Girls at Two Peas in a Bucket!

This week, Glitter Girl went on a bit of a longer adventure than usual, with a masterclass in clustered embellishments. You might want to grab a drink first… and maybe a few crafty pieces to play along with this week’s forty-two minutes of scrapping tv!

This month I’ve been loving this look from Laura – I need to stop admiring the mason jar trend and actually put it to use! Fancy a look in my shopping bucket? Right now, it includes Cute Overload stickers from Amy Tangerine’s new Ready Set Go collection, This is true happiness stamp by Elle’s Studio, Tell Your Story badges (cameras, woodgrain and turquoise? Yes please.), pink polka dot camera washi tape (perfection!) and the classic label stickers from October Afternoon in a new all black edition.

How about a shopping spree? This month’s Gardeners’ Digest giveaway is Two Peas shopping money! For every hundred comments, the prize goes up by $10. Ten bucks for the first hundred comments… then twenty, thirty, forty. You can only comment once and you have until the end of next Thursday. If there are lots and lots of comments, that prize pot might make it up to a $100 shopping spree perhaps! You might want to tell a friend.

Now, once you’ve left that comment, remember to click on over to the next Garden Girl. Your next stop is the lovely Laura Craigie, at PaperLuLu, a blog filled with the cutest of handmades. And enjoy the digest posts from all the Garden Girls! You can also catch up with the Two Peas blog for everything happening in Pealand!

Gardeners’ Digest is a monthly update from the Garden Girls, the design team at Two Peas in a Bucket. To keep up with the Garden Girls throughout the month, check out the garden gallery, find us on Twitter or subscribe to all our blogs with just a couple clicks.

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This week Glitter Girl goes a little trendy with the ombre look, prompted by this discussion on the message board. Ombre is essentially a fade – it’s often a monochromatic look with one colour starting as a saturated hue and fading out to pale or white. In scrapbooking, there are two different ways to achieve that look – one is tidy and one is messy! The tidy version involves cutting different pieces of paper, like using the same punch on ten different shades of pink paper, then arranging them in order from lightest to darkest. Just paper and adhesive – no mess. (Have a look at this project by Jen Gallacher for a great example of that style.) Or the messy way: using mist, ink or paint to create the faded effect on paper or embellishments. In this week’s video? It’s the messy version.

Because really: chevron patterned paper AND a bunch of different shades of Mister Huey’s spray inks? This is the sort of thing that gets Glitter Girl out of bed in the morning.

You can find all the supplies used in this week’s video here. The orange-and-white chevron paper I started with is from Bella Blvd and takes the colour really well. I’ve included the full line of Soup Staples as well, as they are perfect for creating this chevron-ombre look in any colour – just pick the paper then mist, ink or paint to match. The b-side of each of those is a tiny polka dot, which also works for ombre. Try it with a distress ink pad or two and the foam applicator to blend. All sorts of things to fade in and fade out!

It’s been a little while since I went back to the stack of kraft cardstock and the equally large stack of backpacking photos. I have to admit I am now reaching the point where I get a little sad when I’m telling that story, because it’s hard to admit it actually wasn’t so recent any more! But not so sad that it’s not fun to work on, of course. Just a little bittersweet. One thing I’m really looking forward to after moving house in the next couple weeks is to sit down with the now four volumes of this trip and plot out what sections need the most attention and really look at it objectively to see how the story is being told on paper. I love that part of the process, and it’s very different from deadline work and that sort of thing, so it’s a good change of pace now and then. This message board thread inspired me to head back to the kraft cardstock, and I love that the ombre look worked so well with something that wasn’t trend-led or focusing on any sort of fashion in the photos. Ombre is truly just a fade, and that’s something that is always around us – not just a fashion trend. So there’s more to this look than first meets the eye.

This week Glitter Girl challenges you to take on the ombre trend in your own style, with whatever you would like to make. Share your project in the gallery at Two Peas and let us know how it all comes together for you.

Onward, covered in glitter, my dear scrapbookers!

The Adventures of Glitter Girl is a weekly series on Two Peas in a Bucket, and goes live every Wednesday. I’ll share each adventure here shortly after that. I hope you enjoy her quests for crafting happiness, and if you ever have a scrapbooking dilemma yourself, you can always call her to action on the message board.

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On the twenty-second of every month, we bring you Gardeners’ Digest – a blog hop of scrapbooking news from the Garden Girls at Two Peas in a Bucket! Here’s a little peek at the next Glitter Girl adventure… any guesses to today’s theme? It will be available for viewing later today. Find it here.

This summer we’ve added two new faces to the garden – Marcy and Lexi! Have a look at their inspiring work “here”: and “here”: and add your favourites to your bookmarks. I love this page by Marcy and this page by Lexi and hope to take a little inspiration from each of them on an upcoming project very soon.

If you’re scrapbooking back to school projects soon, Two Peas has a wealth of inspiration for you! Check out Two Peas Back to School for plenty of ideas.

This month my five product picks are each products I’ll be using as I scrap my way through September with Learn Something New Every Day. I’m piecing together my supplies and they include divided page protectors, washi tape, stamps, patterned paper and a few little stars. What will you be scrapping with this September? (For more info on joining us for Learn Something New, check this post and go ahead and sign up!)

How about a quick giveaway? The prizes are tiered this month, so the more comments, the better the prize haul. Let’s start with Jen Gallacher’s new miniworkshop on scrapbook journaling, Words Unsaid. After 150 comments, the winner can add a stamp (or set) of her choice from this Hero Arts stamp selection. After 300 comments, add on your pick of collection pack. After 500 comments, top it all off with an album of your choice. Leave a comment on this post to enter. One comment per person, and entries close at the end of next Wednesday – so you have one week to enter.

Your next stop is Lisa Truesdell so do head right over there to see the wonderment she has chosen for this month’s digest!

Gardeners’ Digest is a monthly update from the Garden Girls, the design team at Two Peas in a Bucket. To keep up with the Garden Girls throughout the month, check out the garden gallery, find us on Twitter or subscribe to all our blogs with just a couple clicks.

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This week, Glitter Girl gets as close to a haul video as she ever will. Have you heard of the haul video phenomenon? It’s an interesting concept… basically, it’s the idea of going shopping, then sharing your shopping (and possibly the fabulous bargains you grabbed) with an audience via your webcam and a Youtube video. These videos can go two ways to me – sometimes the shopper shows you something they found with a clever deal or great excitement for a new project and it makes you consider a product you’ve never seen or never considered. That sort of thing can be quite inspiring! As someone who tries to pick the supplies I will love and use rather than just the things that are a crazy discount, sometimes haul videos can be a bit too much stuff for my personal taste and I get a bit twitchy, but I know that’s just one of those things about being me! But this week, Glitter Girl unpacked an order from Two Peas in a Bucket (funny, I’m sure that box says it’s address to mild-mannered scrapbooker Shimelle Laine) and takes you through her process of how her creative process starts straight out of the box.

This week’s adventure was inspired by this question on the message board, about mixing and matching various companies and collections in one project. The truth is I don’t set out on a special quest to mix like that – it’s just what happens as I look at new supplies and start to match them with what I already have. (To give you an idea, I tend to order from Two Peas on an average of once every three weeks, and I normally kit up about five layouts straight out of the box, then everything else gets put away with my supplies. Kitting up a few pages straight away inspires me to get creating rather than just looking through all the pretty paper for hours… which I could easily do!)

For a full list of supplies for this project and some of the highlighted items from the order, please see this page and scroll to the bottom to add your favourites to your shopping basket. Those Ink & Wit stamps on 75% off sale can be found here by the way – there are a variety of designs and they are all in final inventory and won’t be restocked, so if you see something you like, grab it!

The photos on this page are from a rather lovely day indeed, when I took up a last-minute place on a letterpress workshop at Typoretum in Essex. Highly recommended. Perhaps I should write up something about that day in more detail? I have done some letterpress before (I have an antique small format press, which we used for our wedding invitations and some other projects, but I have just a limited selection of type and the lot is in storage at the moment as there is nowhere for it to live in the tiny flat of these days, but I would never agree to letting it go!) but I wouldn’t say that was necessary in the slightest to enjoy the workshop. Instead, it made me want to focus on what I couldn’t do with my own equipment, which was work in a large format. So I pressed up something with lots of mixed wood type and swooned over the serious collection of type and presses at the Typoretum workshop. I’m hoping I’ll be able to work there for another day soon with more project ideas brewing away!

Now if you were paying attention, you’ll have picked up on how I said I tend to kit up about five projects straight out of the box, yet this episode only included one scrapbook page. Would you care to see the rest? If so, I’ll see what I can do.

Your challenge this week is to mix products from a variety of manufacturers – but especially by paying attention to the steps in your creative process as you gather your supplies. Share your project in the gallery at Two Peas and let us know how it all comes together for you.

Onward, covered in glitter, my dear scrapbookers!

The Adventures of Glitter Girl is a weekly series on Two Peas in a Bucket, and goes live every Wednesday. I’ll share each adventure here shortly after that. I hope you enjoy her quests for crafting happiness, and if you ever have a scrapbooking dilemma yourself, you can always call her to action on the message board.

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Glitter Girl got quite excited this week upon reading this thread on the message boards and realising it was time for an entire episode devoted to instant photos, like Polaroids and Instax. She got so excited that she went a bit over the top, with an extended episode just over forty minutes long including two scrapbook pages and a section all about your options for instant cameras and prints. Grab a drink and have a watch, won’t you?

If any of the products in this week’s episode strike your fancy, do click over and scroll down the page to add them to your shopping cart. There are quite a few of my favourites in this episode: wood veneer shapes, that Bella Blvd alphabet in several colours and the Paper Cottage collection pack from BasicGrey.

The first project in this week’s episode includes a vintage Polaroid from my youth. Most of the Polaroid prints from my family were taken at Christmas, but I really wanted to tell the longer story of my first bicycle rather than focusing on the Christmas gift aspect, so I didn’t scrap this in reds and greens. Pink and aqua (and this time, red) are winding up on my table a lot lately.

The second page is one tiny, recent Instax Mini picture printed from my regular digital camera on a Pivi portable printer. I know not everyone likes one tiny picture on a big 12×12 page, but I like variety, so sometimes I think that’s just right. Amy and I have started a bit of a tradition of a photo of her in front of her new collection in a certain style, so this shot from the summer show was perfect for writing down a few details about this lovely girl who is a faraway friend.

Onward, covered in glitter, my dear scrapbookers!

The Adventures of Glitter Girl is a weekly series on Two Peas in a Bucket, and goes live every Wednesday. I’ll share each adventure here shortly after that. I hope you enjoy her quests for crafting happiness, and if you ever have a scrapbooking dilemma yourself, you can always call her to action on the message board.

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On the twenty-second of every month, we bring you Gardeners’ Digest – a blog hop of scrapbooking news from the Garden Girls at Two Peas in a Bucket! It’s been an especially Two Peas week for me, with the rare opportunity to catch up with Two Peas at CHA. In person we are equal parts crazy ideas, serious business and chatty fun. I’m pretty sure Amy, Kristina and I stopping to take this snap with Heidi Swapp counts as all three.

With all the CHAness on my calendar this week, I haven’t had a chance to blog the latest Glitter Girl adventure! It’s all about challenging patterned papers, and includes two layouts this week in an extended episode. You can find it here, including the pages, videos and easy shopping! You can catch all the other Glitter Girl adventures from this past month here if you’ve missed anything!

This month I’ve found myself taking the time to look at all the tiny details on pages like this one by Jaime Warren. Take a closer look at her gallery here and see what little touches might complement your own scrapping style. I love how she works with small photos but also a lot of open space, so despite the beautiful details, your eyes are still taken to the pictures.

This month my shopping basket has been filled with papery goodness and very few embellishments really. I have been using these printable journaling cards by Hello Forever (mostly because they include that rainbow Polaroid camera!), the Paper Cottage collection pack from BasicGrey, this great paper tablet from BasicGrey Clippings and the 6×6 version of Studio Calico HeyDay. Plus something not paper – this hexagon mask by Studio Calico for use with mist, paint or ink makes a great framework to hold smaller, simpler embellishments like buttons, brads and small die-cuts. What products have been catching your eye this month? Paper, tools, embellishments or a mix of everything?

With new releases expected over the next two months, there’s a fabulously big sale on at Two Peas right now.  (In fact, I just searched by price low to high to see how discounted things are, and there is actually a piece of paper marked down to just nine cents. Super sale!) To help with your shopping, I’ll give a $15 Two Peas gift certificate to three (three!) lucky readers this month. To enter, just leave a comment on this post! Entries close at the end of next Thursday, UK time, and the winners will be announced on Friday.

Now, once you’ve left that comment, remember to click on over to the next Garden Girl. Your next stop is the always amazing Jen Gallacher, a blog filled with constant happiness. And enjoy the digest posts from all the Garden Girls! You can also catch up with the Two Peas blog for everything happening in Pealand!

Fancy a post CHA chat? Just a tiny notice: I’m going to host an hour of live chat tonight/today (depending on your time zone) over on the Two Peas CHA message board. That chat will kick off at 8pm UK time, which is 2pm US Central time, and with a bit of luck you can adjust from there. I have lots of CHA posts left to finish the commentary and set live, but if you fancy some real time discussion on the message board, that’s where I’ll be! See you there, I hope!

Gardeners’ Digest is a monthly update from the Garden Girls, the design team at Two Peas in a Bucket. To keep up with the Garden Girls throughout the month, check out the garden gallery, find us on Twitter or subscribe to all our blogs with just a couple clicks.

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This week Glitter Girl read this discussion and thought surely there are plenty of ideas already out there for scrapbooking with ribbon, so she ran a trusty little search in places like Google and Pinterest. She found far, far more examples of how to store your scrapbooking ribbon than to use your scrapbooking ribbon, so she decided it might be best to start simply: a little washi, a little ribbon and a challenge to get you to use both on a layout this week.

This week Glitter Girl was quite excited to start working with BasicGrey’s new collection, Paper Cottage. You can find all that plus plenty of options for ribbon and washi tape here – just scroll to the bottom of the page to shop! Thank you BG for this great collection in colours I love.

After a little break from this album, I finally got my thoughts in order enough for this picture. The ‘In Blue’ title comes from the uniform colour – each level or grade or whatever they called the different divisions had a different uniform, with leotards handmade at the studio. So I can tell exactly where this fits in the timeline due to the leotard on its own, but the mismatched skirts and such do make me laugh! I decided to put some of the writing on show (and it is easier – but not completely easy – to read in person) and some additional writing tucked away in the pocket for my own personal notes but not really for public consumption. This album is filled with so much writing and I’m loving it, piecing together the story with so many fewer photos than I take now. It’s a good creative challenge and good for the mind to get all those memories filed away in a sensible way. Plus I’m giving myself permission to use pink on every layout. As if I need permission.

This week, Glitter Girl challenges you to use both ribbon and washi tape on your project, then share the results in the gallery! If you don’t have both, you can cheat and use what you have, but if you own both, use both! You can also leave a link in the comments here if you like.

Onward, covered in glitter, my dear scrapbookers!

The Adventures of Glitter Girl is a weekly series on Two Peas in a Bucket, and goes live every Wednesday. I’ll share each adventure here shortly after that. I hope you enjoy her quests for crafting happiness, and if you ever have a scrapbooking dilemma yourself, you can always call her to action on the message board.

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